Dear iidb: Guy babbling about Christ, evolution, and the big bang.

[Jarhyn]

Am I nit being clear Learner?

I speculate based on what I know of mythology, communications. religion, people. and the geopolitics of the day in Israel.

What you have as Christianity today traces back to a political compromise at the Council Of Nivea between different versions and power factions within Christianity. The RCC still claims after over a 1000 yars to be the one true Christian church.

A major issue was whether Jesus was divine or not. After the new synthesis that defined what it meant to be Christian competing versions were harshly suppressed, writings were destroyed.

A question us what was the intention of the gospel writers. With the obvious Greek influence to me it was targeting non Jewish gentiles/pagans in the Roman empire.

Jesus as a demigod would appeal to Greeks and Romans. It fits their historical mythology.

So as I said I do not take the gospels and NT in general as factual. Illiteracy dominated and communication was by word of mouth subject to errors and intentional additions and fabrication and embellishments.

The common core of Christianity as it became is the Nicene Creed. Look it up.

Outside of the RCC which defines its theology, Christians freely interpret OT and NT as it suits them. Courtesy of The Reformation. Have you heard of that?

To me you are a run of the mill Christian.

There are non western Christian traditions today that trace back to the ancient times.

This is why I strongly urge Learner to read the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, among other documents. It is among one of the very earliest and simplest gospels, containing a minimal number of quotes existing almost entirely without context.

Of all the quotes of and from Jesus in other gospels, these have the highest probability of being "real attributions" because they are simple, consistent, sometimes rather bizarre, and were neither shoehorned together to force a narrative nor stored originally in a way to imply the people who cared about it were beholden to worship the damn thing - the oldest copy discovered was stored alongside secular philosophy.

Personally, I want to get my hands on legitimate traditions, beliefs, histories, and ideological structures of the last remaining JtB cult just so I can compare their beliefs with Christians and see what attributions might be appropriations?